Forget Bin Laden; Can We Have the 4th Amendment Back?

My two cents:
  1. Obama wishes the election was tomorrow. Joe Sixpack thinks he's the shit right now.  This gives him cover to do anything he wants for a week.  Wonder what he'll pick?  Long term, 2012 is looking really good for him.  His relevant record, for the purpose of wooing male white independent voters, is stellar: he lowered taxes, got the Dow Jones back to 12K, got employment trending up, stayed above the fray of Washington gossip and bickering, and can now end the wars, not because he's giving up, but because we "won," and we need to  control costs and rein in deficits. Oil prices just dropped today, too - if he can get gas back down to $2 he can phone in the election.

  2. It will be immensely hard to get back what we surrendered in the name of catching this guy.  Now that we have supercomputers monitoring all phone, email and internet traffic, they're gonna want to make a permanent exception to the warrant requirement and keep their expensive toys. Prosecuting ex-Bush officials for violating FISA rules and eavesdropping on American phone sex would be a start.  The Supreme Court is going to have to take the lead. We may need one or two more Obama appointees in order to restore the Fourth Amendment and clarify the place of non-state sponsored enemy combatants capable of doing state-level violence to U.S. interests.  Obama could kick-start the process by using all this temporary goodwill to repeal the PATRIOT Act . . .

  3. Bin Laden was politically significant, regardless of the actual effect of his death on Al Qaeda.  He was the justification for war in Afghanistan, and, indirectly, in Iraq. Political support for the wars is, in actuality, disappearing.  Beware the mainstream media, however, who will report that Americans don't want to end the wars, they want to continue fighting terrorism.  That's bullshit.
  4. The legacy of Georgia W Bush and the Neo-Cons has been completely destroyed, pissed on and kicked into the gutter. We didn't need two wars, a torture chamber and a trillion dollars to kill Bin Laden, just decent leadership and a Navy SEAL team with attitude. You shallow, elitist, alcoholic fuckwad!
  5. It appears to me that Al Qaeda will splinter into local gangs of relatively little importance to us after this.  America will not be attacked and will be very secure through the 2012 election.  The main threat has been and will continue to be economic: our "bankers" sabotaged our country from within and should be treated like the traitors they are. Send the SEALs to Wall Street.

a young marxist

  6. Big picture, as always: we are our own worst enemy.  Bin Laden wanted to cause economic chaos in the US and failed. Yes, the airlines suffered, but they were on very shaky ground to begin with.  We basically got over 9-11 and recovered in the short term.  What really caused the chaos Bin Laden wanted came in 2008, and it was not an attack from outside America, but from within. The people were again attacked by Capitalism.  A mortgage speculation bubble of corruption, fraud, and greed exploded like Fukushima, contaminating all the honest businesses and all the hard-working people. The traitorous acts of homegrown financial terrorism we suffered may still take down our country. Running around looking for maniacs with bombs in their underwear is a waste of time. In order to save America, we must reverse this trend toward financial deregulation and privatization of government services. We must break up too-big-to-fail companies and enact campaign finance reform.  
  We have met the enemy and he is Capital.

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people” - Abraham Lincoln 

UPDATE: I had a picture of dead Osama posted but it was a fake so I took it down. Sorry - it was sent to me by a retired Admiral with heavy intelligence connections.